John Young wrote...
He fingers the international telecom hubs in NYC through which NSA grabs most of the data purposely sent through them to transoceanic cables worldwide. Hmm, the hubs on the West Coast are not mentoned. Wonder if that traffic is now redirected through New York too for easy watching.
I sincerely doubt that all of it can be. If anything, they have a local pre-sort that either discards low probability-of- interesting traffic or stores Variola suitcase-like it for periodic retreival or examination. Possibly, some of it will get routed through here (I say 'here' because out my window I see one of the big NYC COs). But if that's the case, look for very high bandwidth cross-country optical systems deployment with many wavelengths and lots of Raman as well as traditional optical amplification. Akin to what Corvis was building until they merged into Broadcom (hum...that's interesting if you think about it). I also happen to know enough about how a lot of the long-distance telecom networks are setup, so I also doubt they'd want to backhaul that through NYC if they're in the beltway, or southish like that. Then again, it's not impossible, and there can be very strong Operations reasons for moving traffic like that. -TD